Be a stone in the river.

When you have a Chronic condition, any disability or illness or trouble that lasts longer than other people have patience for, they often talk up how great it is for you to always be fighting, always "keep fighting this". Guess what?

They mean well but that is *exhausting* and irrational to expect.

 I'm not saying give up, I am saying you do not have to fight all the time. No one can be in an aggressive mode every day, "inspirational" only when thrashing about against the current. Sit in the current. Be a stone in the river. Let the river go past. 

“Heaven is where you are standing, and that is the place to train.” Aikido founder O Sensei Morihei Ueshiba.

I’m not saying you have to be pleased to be where you are. Being sick or disabled in some way often just sucks. It isn’t sunshine and rainbows.

But it is where you are right now, and it might help to know
that you do not have to wait to be happy
until you get better.
You can be happy or at least At Peace in some ways here and now.

Once more: You do not have to wait to be happy
until some future or impossible time when you get better.

You don’t always have to be “fighting”. You deserve to have peace now. Let yourself have it.

Aikido and Recovery

 How do you manage to balance (or not) martial arts and other parts of your life?

Aikido is a big part of my mental/personal health. I learn lessons there to apply to my personal emotional challenges. It’s been instrumental in the healing and recovery I am trying to do. It shows me in a kinetic and physical way where my fears still are, and what I can do about them.
Getting personal here, TW mentions of abuse and trauma:

It’s not an official “diagnosis”, but I have a decade or two’s worth of Complex-PTSD, which in my case is the slow trauma I got from long term bullying or emotional abuse, with threats or incidents of physical abuse. I have complex trust issues and problems ever feeling safe. Besides the obvious physical empowerment of a martial art for some self defense, Aikido is teaching me to practice trust, to enforce boundaries, and to speak up when people hurt me or I am uncomfortable.

That last is very difficult as I have had a lifetime of being "trained", told repeatedly and firmly, to be silent when I am hurting or unhappy. In our Aikido Dojo, if you ask someone to stop hurting you... they stop, instead of laughing, ignoring you, dismissing your pain, or increasing it for their entertainment. That is very new and precious to me and I am learning from it.

I am learning which motions still make me uncomfortable, and then in my outside therapy I can address the reasons for those. I get severely dizzy doing a certain turn and I realized it’s because I hate moving backward when I can’t see what’s behind me... because of fear and hypervigilance. I was able to then talk to my counselor about that.

I am also learning how to move with and around things instead of fighting against them. That’s the literal principle behind Aikido but it’s also been helping me in my emotional and personal struggles. “It is far easier to roll a rock, using its own momentum, than to try to carry the same rock. Stop trying to carry the rock!” I put myself through a lot of mental anguish I do not have to actually deal with any more  if I would just stop trying to carry it. So now it’s in inner mantra- “Stop trying to carry the rock!”

Day 17 of the Autumn 2015 Sinus troubles.

I've been sick for 17 days now. Only about 3 of those involved leaving the house at all. I am getting bored of my bedroom. *WHINE* I'm a big baby.

 As I mentioned,  I've been diagnosed with Silent Sinus Syndrome, which is a rare condition where the sinuses in the front of one side of the face close up for as long as several years. I also have a deviated septum. This probably is part of why my allergic reactions turn into painful acute sinus infections within about 48 hours, those infections linger for a month or so, then crawl into my lungs to nest for the winter.

Fixing it requires surgery. I don't know when I get the surgery- I have a consult appointment next week. I don't know how long recovery will take either. This is only upsetting for me in that I am sick right now, and that I was going to get a dog.

 I need a dog. I am a sad piece of misery without one. My house is too quiet. No one wakes me up to go for walks.

There's the catch, though. To have a dog, I have to be healthy enough to move around. I am not, so I can't. I am so lonely without a dog. I won't be able to have one until I am healthy enough to move around again, outdoors. I wear a scarf over my nose and mouth in winter here anyway because I almost always have or am recovering form lung infections in winter, so I can't breathe icy cold air.
I wanted to get a dog and go scootering with him in the mornings. I was healthy enough to do it, too. And then this happened. Foo.

You'd think after years of winter bedrest for months at a time, I'd get used to bedrest. Nope. Still as whiny as ever. I hate not being able to at least sit up and do things, but the more I do anything other than lie down or against pillows in bed, the sicker I get the next day. I have to REST.  Well, tomorrow after I do my online test I am gonna play computer games on the couch downstairs. I can be bundled up down there just as easily as up here.


Yes, online test. Did I mention the awesome side of this?
1. They caught the SSS before my eyeball started to sag. That's right, most people only know they have this thingy when their sinus has imploded so much that the bone under the eye socket is dissolved and their eye starts to droop. NOPE NOPE NOPE. So I am very thankful my CT scan showed that I have it before anything happened to my precious eyes. I am exceedingly visual and I need my eyes.
2. In spite of my brain fog making reading hard, I have found an Audio Dramatization by the BBC of my textbook, (still chortling over that) and that's been letting me "study" for the test I need to to take which is  ONLINE. My History class is at the cutting edge, for a college course, and that means our assignments and tests are all ONLINE. I can take the test from right here in my bed! I don't have to haul my weak butt into the testing center!
This is important because to attend our school you must be healthy and mobile. If you cannot wheel or walk a quarter mile or more from parking lots to classrooms, you cannot attend classes. Elevators and a few ramps do not an Accessible Campus make, not if you're too sick to walk long distances but not actually disabled.


I miss going to Aikido. I miss how cool it was to be healthy enough to work out and work hard.
I really, really miss my dog.

Zen, attainment and goals

A friend asked me,“Do you think more goals come along after achieving hyper-focused goals we’ve had for years? I’ve been chasing my goals so long that I literally do not know what I would do once I achieve these goals. I’m like a dog chasing cars- what would I ever do if I caught one?”

Did you see the Disney film Tangled? We’re like Rapunzel. She had a dream to go see the lights. Along that journey, her experiences stacked up and built her into a new person, so that once she had seen the lights, she realized that seeking that goal had led her to a new goal.

You cannot make a new joy the one thing you set up to seek. A boy dreams of becoming a pilot but when he goes to flight school he finds out it is hard work. He perseveres because he wants to fly. When he does get his dream, he enjoys it for quite some time, and he always does enjoy it, but the novelty does wear off a little. Suddenly he discovers photography and uses his plane for aerial shots. He has a new dream to pursue.

To Seek Joy makes Joy a noun, a thing we can attain or lose. To Enjoy is a verb- it’s a thing we can keep doing over and over again.  I think we can have more Joy in Verbs than in Nouns. I mean: A Thing is passing- Doing is continual.

A man and a woman fall blissfully in love and decide to get married. One morning she wakes up and realizes she no longer feels that “old thrill” about him, and she doesn’t feel the way she did when she married him. She is not “In Love”, but she thinks about how they care for each other, and decides she still loves him, and that she will continue to. She realizes Love as a Noun is a thing you can lose, but To Love as a Verb is something she can do. She talks to her husband, and he agrees- that “spark” is gone, but as they say, nothing lasts.. Should they quit their marriage because they lost a thing they had? They decide instead to find new “sparks.” They take a road trip together, do new activities, spend time together, and discover new ways they can love each other. They spend over 50 years discovering Loving as a Verb, discovering ever new horizons of caring and connection.

People who try to make one pivotal experience last forever and be their true satisfaction are often unhappy because they are trying to make a moment last forever. The true value of those moments is that they are rare and precious- that they do not last. Instead of despairing because we cannot make a moment last, we might find more joy in just savoring the moment. As we savor it, it becomes part of us, and even when it is over, we have it always.

Every joy we do not try to prolong artificially leads us to new joys.
What we grasp and cling at, we lose- what we let go of, we find we can keep forever.

(sourcing CS Lewis more than perhaps a little here, go read Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain. )

Aikido and Grief

Jul 8. 2015
I had to let my darling dog go “Home” this last week. It was hard for me, but she was losing her ability to do all the things she wanted to do, and her body was quitting on her. She was already aching most of the time, so we let her go before she started to really suffer. I think I’m handling it as best as can be expected. I had a while to get used to the idea and really adjust to it as a huge change in my life. Funny thing was, Aikido helped me through it.

I had told Sensei I might not be at our session on Thursday because that morning we were putting my dear dog ‘to sleep’. He understood and was very kind and sympathetic.

So when I showed up on Thursday afternoon, he raised his eyebrows and said, “I thought you weren’t going come to practice today!”

And I said, “At first I wasn’t going to be here, because I knew how much I’d be dealing with… Then I realized that that’s exactly why I needed to be here.”

He nodded. “That’s right.” Just before he turned away I saw his grin. I think he was trying not to show too much of how proud he was that this week I had grasped a part of Aikido Zen.